Today’s guest post is by Anne Leonard, a colleague of mine at City Tech, CUNY.

The morning after the presidential election of 2016, I was alone in my apartment, and I was nearing the end of a year-long sabbatical. My spouse was traveling for work, my running buddy was out of town, and I hadn’t made any plans, figuring I would meet up with friends at the spontaneous festivities I envisioned as we Brooklynites took to the streets to celebrate the ascent of the first woman leader of the Free World. As that gray morning pushed into midday and afternoon, I realized how much I missed my City Tech colleagues, who surely grasped the gravity of the new regime and the threats to our freedom to write, speak, assemble, teach, learn, and research, etc. etc. etc. that lay ahead. I didn’t know it yet, but after that day I was ready to return to college routines and rhythms. Earlier I wrote about a big walk that was the crux of my sabbatical experience. Within a few months I went from lacing up my hiking shoes daily to filling big shoes as I moved into the role of interim chief librarian and department chair after a year of sabbatical leave.

A wise friend and colleague assured me that the most angst-inducing part of returning from sabbatical were the few moments spent approaching the college entrance, crossing the threshold into the familiar college building, swiping my ID, and finding myself in the swirl again. Our urban campus is experienced as entering a megastructure shared by 17,500 students and thousands of staff and full-time and part-time faculty, not stepping onto a grassy quad. Once I crossed that threshold, I was forevermore in the select elite who had gone on sabbatical. I was also surprisingly at ease in familiar surroundings.

I anticipated a steep learning curve upon assuming interim boss duties. What follows is an annotated list of things I am grateful to have learned and experienced while doing a new and much bigger job for six months.

I quickly acquired super meeting stamina for super long meetings. Within a week or 2 of the start of the semester, I discovered that 2+hour meetings are nothing to fear, resist, or dread. They’re fine! And eventually they come to an end. Translating my notes from the meeting into something concise and digestible to share with my colleagues at the next department meeting — now, that is a skill I am still working on.

Even before I laced up my boss boots, I anticipated asking if not the dumb questions, then the naive questions. I thought my six months as interim chair and chief would be an ideal time to use my inexperience to my advantage and ask questions like “How come we still do ____ this way?” or “How do you get permissions in the system to do ___ ?” (fill in the blanks with myriad tasks related to personnel processes or the online integrated resources and services tool). When I asked for help, colleagues were so thoughtful and generous with their time! Still, I wish I’d asked even more naive questions in some of those super long meetings. They would not have made those meetings much longer.

Early on, I noticed that a misstep led to a ripple effect; my mistakes in the boss role were much more time-consuming to correct and contain than missteps I made in my role as instruction/information literacy coordinator. Containing the ripples took much more time than doing the task correctly the first time; as a result of this experience, my attention to detail improved.

It was a time to use my power benevolently. I made ample use of the phrases, “It’s fine to tell me later” or “Take a few days and get back to me” when I asked colleagues about committing to a project, joining a committee, or taking on extra work of various sorts. Sabbatical offered me a new perspective on how time progresses — more slowly than I had thought. My work as interim chief and chair taught me that not everybody makes decisions the same way I do.

I also learned to ask for a reply-by date in emails, and I learned some finer points of email etiquette. I still make very sparing use of the high importance ! tag in emails, relying on the words in my message to convey importance. After a colleague expressed confusion about an email I’d sent on a weekend, I began to use the low importance ↓ tag when I used email for routine communications outside of work hours.

I got a bit smarter about routine scheduling. Something I learned to do in my first days as interim chief and chair — and I wish I’d been doing all along — is scheduling all meetings of a particular flavor for the semester at once. It clarified colleagues’ availability for the reference and instruction coordinators, allowing those folks to move on those scheduling tasks with greater ease

I learned that the library runs because non-librarians do their jobs consistently and with sincere investment in contributing to the highest quality student learning experience that we can provide. I’m in awe of the talent and dedication of officers, administrators, assistants, student workers, and other staff who make the college and library function better because of their daily, reliable, genuine work.

Recognizing that certain attitudes and mindsets would contribute to my success (and maintenance of sanity) more than others, I strove to be always engaged, yet to maintain a certain detachment. I realized that mental energy spent worrying about ongoing, institution-wide budget and personnel complexities fully out of my control (or colleagues’ reactions to those complexities) was energy I would not have to actually solve the problems or communicate my concerns coherently.

I like to think that my time in the interim chief and chair role helped me become a little more adept at seeing large-scale patterns, and with them, upcoming plot twists, such as policy or personnel changes and budget inconsistencies. To use this aptitude advantageously is to consider a range of possible future developments and how the library will respond, rather than obsess or ruminate overmuch about calamities that haven’t happened yet.

Some days I almost regret not having more time in the role of interim chief librarian and department chair. With more time, I might have found some relaxed mental space to hatch the good ideas that fill in the big picture goals and help us move towards the library we envision.

I’ve been meaning to write this followup post for a while, but this first semester back from sabbatical has been busy. Unusually busy, even. Which is even more reason for me to work on writing this post about how to hold time and space for my research and scholarship now that I’m back from sabbatical.

One strategy that I’ve fallen into far too often in the past for keeping up with my research has been additive, tacking project and writing time on top of my usual workday schedule (and, too often, on the weekends). For me that’s not been sustainable; I’ve come very close to burnout. In addition to time and space to work on my research, sabbatical afforded me the time and space to think about other ways to incorporate research time into my schedule without spending every waking moment on work or research.

A few years ago I started waking up a little bit earlier than I needed to and spending my first hour awake each weekday morning on writing and research. That hour — accompanied by coffee, before getting ready for work — has proven to be the most reliable way for me to make progress on my research projects. It can be slow going, for sure. Sometimes that hour goes by too quickly (or even too slowly), or I end up not using many of the words I’ve written. Even so, the consistency of that habit means that eventually it all adds up to something.

This semester it’s been harder to get back to that hour. Going from the summer to my kid’s fall school schedule — which varies from term to term — was an adjustment, as it always is. Last month my spouse started a new job, which meant a change for all of our morning routines. Combined with more than the usual number of early-ish meetings at work, I’ve been slacking on my morning research and writing hour more days than I’d like (though I’m proud to say that I’m writing this very post during that morning hour).

The morning hour is a good habit, but sometimes I fall into the bad habit of beating myself up for not getting enough research and writing done. So I’m bringing back the research journal where I quickly note what I did at the end of each morning hour (full disclosure: it’s just a spreadsheet with the date and a few words about what I did). I’d put this aside during sabbatical in favor of more robust ways to track my projects, but this is the perfect tool for me to stay accountable to myself and stay motivated.

Habits are tricky things: once you get into the groove it’s easier to stay there, but even long-time habits can be broken and it’s hard to get back into that groove once you’re out. At this point in the semester — a couple of days off this week, then full steam ahead hold onto your hats for one more busy month — getting back into keeping up with my morning hour is still a challenge. But I know this is a good habit, a habit I need, the habit I’ve built that’s been most successful in enabling me to keep up with research and writing. And it’s perhaps not surprising that after sabbatical I ended up back at the habit I’d established before sabbatical: one hour every weekday morning, first thing.

…Or when to step away from the laptop and enroll in an utterly immersive course in humanity

Today’s guest post is by Anne Leonard, a colleague of mine at City Tech, CUNY.

During my sabbatical I undertook one of the most challenging and transformative experiences of my life, which on its surface, appears to have little to do with academic librarianship or teaching and learning in higher education. Fulfilling a nearly decade-long dream, I walked over 800km (500 miles) from southwest France over the Pyrenees and across northern Spain on the Camino de Santiago, or Way of Saint James. The Camino has called out to me since I first discovered it several years ago as a tourist in Galicia, the northwesternmost province of Spain. Over the ensuing years, I researched both the practical and the metaphysical aspects of undertaking the pilgrimage. The connection between academic library work and walking the Camino (which can be viewed variously as a spiritual quest, an extended Spanish vacay, or a very long exercise in vanity thinly disguised as personal growth) may seem elusive, but the lessons I learned there continue to resonate in my professional and personal life, and I have found an intellectual community of multidisciplinary colleagues who query the cultural, historical, spiritual, and embodied dimensions of pilgrimage in an annual symposium.

When I began to draft my sabbatical narrative, I knew I wanted more time to dig more deeply into the fascinating teaching and learning theories that formed the underpinnings of the faculty development seminar I’d worked with for awhile. As the research and pedagogy liaison, I helped design field experiences that provided faculty with the tools to design engaging extramural learning experiences that met general education learning outcomes while covering the discipline-specific content of a technical and professional college curriculum. I envisioned myself doing quite a bit of embodied research on my sabbatical, that is, fieldwork where I was the research subject, as a walker in the city. The foregrounding of the city and its complex issues and problems makes for a perennially engaging starting point for research topics in across all disciplines at the college of technology where I work. One of the only things that students at our college have in common is their connection to, and residence in, New York City (fewer than 10% of students live outside of New York City). My motive was to test my theory about the metacognitive affordances of walking and walking as a means to learn. Does “solvitas perambulum” really work? What would I know upon reaching Santiago de Compostela, Spain that I didn’t know when I started in St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France, and how would I know it?

Between Viana, autonomous community and province of Navarre, and Logroño, capital of the autonomous community and province of La Rioja.

Once I started, I realized that the Camino is an experience about sharing – space for every activity of daily life – sleeping, dressing, bathing, laundering, sharing blister remedies, germs, food and wine, stories and perspectives. The peregrinos (pilgrims) I met hailed from several dozen countries, spoke as many languages, fell into all age categories (I met folks from anywhere between 9 and 79), and demonstrated a range of physical abilities. Some I walked with for an hour or 2, some in groups and for several days, long enough to become close like a family. Others I met intermittently, our paths crossing serendipitously after days or weeks of occupying different time-spaces. Yet as much as I shared with the thousands who made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in 2016 (around 300,000), as a peregrina sola, undertaking the way on my own, I found myself regularly overwhelmed by the ample opportunity to be alone with myself. Early on, around day 8, in lovely Logroño, capital of La Rioja, I found myself in conversation with new compadres discussing the need to just Be. With. Your. Self. Authentically. We joked about our innately competitive natures and our feelings of resentment when we noticed someone who seemed to be “caminoing better than me.” We all nodded sagely over our pintxos and tintos, as if we were already completely adept at feeling comfortable in our own skins at all times during this intense and unfamiliar, engrossing experience. This conversation went on for weeks, mostly in my own head, as I made my way west with a 14-pound pack, no advance reservations apart from a return flight, and only painted yellow arrows to show the way. When my path crossed that of one of my compradres from that evening, in Astorga, 18 days and 350 kilometers down the road, we returned to this topic easily and more lightly, no longer burdened by some notion of authenticity we felt we had to prove, and feeling freer to express our Camino frustrations (we’d both run into the same creep and endured his serial harassment), Camino fails (taking unscheduled zero-kilometer days, losing our camino families, unexpectedly falling ill), and Camino victories (completing 30+ kilometer days, building a daily reflection habit, sticking to a resolution to avoid social media). I feel it’s important to mention that we made time for a restorative café con leche y napolitana (the latter is a useful pastry vocabulary word to know; it’s similar to a chocolate croissant).

My credencial, filled with stamps

When I arrived in Santiago de Compostela in mid-October, the second thing to do, after attending pilgrims’ mass at 11 am (after a quick 11km walk from Lavacolla, out by the Santiago international airport), was to present my credencial in return for my Compostela. All pilgrims carry the same few things, in addition to our packs of clean-enough socks, one or two changes of clothing, and little else: our credenciales, or pilgrim passports. This document bears the stamps that we collected daily, from albergues (pilgrims’ hostels), cafes and bars, and churches. Upon arrival in Santiago de Compostela, we present these to the volunteer staff at the Oficina de acogida al peregrino. They verify the stamps to ensure that the pilgrim has completed the last 100km on foot or horseback (or 200km by bicycle) and issue the Compostela, written in Latin. The pilgrims’ office reminded me of nothing so much as the Manhattan marriage bureau. Verklempt and dizzy from hunger, I felt as if the polished marble floor might suddenly rush up and smack my forehead while I waited on a long line with hundreds of other peregrinos. Over 28,000 peregrinos would arrive in Santiago that month. Seeing (and smelling) my fellow pilgrims assembled in the cathedral and in the oficina, I recognized few faces. As disparate as our pilgrimages surely were, I understood then that we all shared the experience of finishing the Camino and with it we shared a range of emotions: pride in accomplishment, ambivalence about returning to regular life, and satisfaction in our abilities to adapt to unfamiliar surroundings.

I was still on the Camino, mentally, for weeks after I returned. Even now, as the one-year anniversary of arriving in Santiago has just passed and I review my journal and photos to jostle my memory to write this, I can find myself immersed in vivid recollections of my days walking the Camino and can easily recall places, names, landscapes, cloud formations and sunrises, tastes and smells, (the flavor of an 11 am wedge of tortilla or the scent of a fellow pilgrim’s laundry soap or unwashed socks). I now understand how the intensity and mundanity of the daily walking routine sharpened my experience and helped me form vivid memories. One year later, I can still summon that focus to absorb an experience and process what I’ve learned from it. For me, the Camino induced metacognition that I could not have achieved another way.

Anne Leonard is an associate professor and the coordinator of information literacy and library instruction at New York City College of Technology, CUNY.

I’ve been back from my sabbatical for two months now. And I’m happy to report that I’m still happy to be back. Since returning I’ve been grappling with both the expected and unexpected, as expected. 🙂 It was somewhat busy during the few weeks I was back in the library in the ramp up before the semester started, and it’s been solidly busy since the semester began six weeks ago.

In some ways it seems like it’s been much much longer than two months since my sabbatical ended. We’re experiencing (hopefully temporary!) library faculty and staff shortages right now that have impacted the rhythm of the semester and added tasks to my day to day list as well. And I think some of my extended-time feeling is the result of current events, everything that’s happening politically and globally. It’s busy at work, busy at home, busy in the world.

But in other ways it still feels like I just got back back from sabbatical yesterday. Back in August I co-wrote a post with my fellow ACRLogger Jen Jarson about her experiences starting a new job and mine returning after my sabbatical. What I’ve found most surprising about returning from sabbatical is that I did come back to the library with fresh eyes, in the same sense as Joan Petit’s tweet in one of Merinda’s posts. I think I thought that six months wouldn’t be nearly long enough for me to grow fresh eyes, especially as some of my research involved coming into the library to interview students last Spring, so I didn’t spend a solid six months off-campus. But it’s true: since coming back to campus and the library I’ve been noticing all kinds of things I hadn’t noticed in a while.

Even now, with two months of non-sabbatical under my belt, I’m holding on to a little bit of that freshness, trying to think about our challenges and successes in new ways. I’m also experimenting with strategies to keep my eyes fresh. On as many days as I can, I’ve tried to use lunchtime for two things: catching up on LIS article and book reading while I eat, and taking a walk right after I eat. Even after sabbatical there’s still a long backlog of Library Things I Want To Read (y’all are so interesting, and write so much good stuff!), and when I can pull myself away from Twitter at lunchtime to read something more sustained it feels good. I’m lucky that the college where I work is at the intersection of a few different neighborhoods and has some park spaces nearby. I’ve figured out a few walks of different lengths, usually 15-40 minutes or so, and (weather-permitting) have tried to take at least a short walk every day. Putting both lunchtime reading and walking on my daily to-do list has helped a bit — even if I don’t get to it that day, the list reminds me of the goal.

And as I write this I realize that coming back from leave puts me a little bit into the mindset of our campus community who use the library, and makes it easier for me to think like a user. Even though most of my research is on students’ academic experiences it’s still easy for my focus to shift solely to the day to day tasks, especially when it’s busy. But it’s worth trying to figure out ways to keep the fresh eyes, I think. Seeing like a student or faculty or staff member can help keep their needs in mind even when everything else — from scheduling to facilities issues to our current job search — takes up time in my days.

Our first guest post comes from a CUNY colleague of mine, Kathleen Collins.

A few weeks before the start of my year-long sabbatical, a colleague remarked that whenever I referred to said sabbatical, I would gesture as if cradling a small, precious object. While I was unaware of doing so, I believe I did instinctively think about said sabbatical as a discrete, special something requiring protection and care. It is, after all, a rare privilege afforded to a very small percentage of humans. I was not of a mind to squander it.

While it’s not true for everyone and doesn’t have to be (see unsolicited advice anon) my sabbatical project was clear cut. I had a book to write. I had been researching it for a few years, whenever I could find the time. So my sabbatical was, on the face of it, to get the thing written. On another level, it was to live out a fantasy I had nurtured since I was about eight years old: to be someone who makes her living as a writer. I had a whole year to pretend I was just that; not a faculty member nor librarian nor employee, just a writer.

To take this self image fantasy to the max, I applied – in retrospect a bit pretentiously and unnecessarily – for a couple of writing residencies, but they didn’t pan out. I wrote about that, and how I created my own neo-residency, here. “Where are you going for your sabbatical?” colleagues asked me in those leading-up weeks. Because I suppose some people have other places they go to do research or overlook a lake or just escape the demands of city and/or family life. Not me. “My apartment,” I said, probably exhibiting the cradling gesture then, too. Like, Maura, I did have a space at the NYPL, in the Wertheim Room, but I found it physically less than ideal to work there – no food or water allowed, a small and crowded restroom, and because it was so nice and silent in that giant mahogany space, any little sound inflamed my misophonia to a disruptive degree. Also, going there necessitated getting dressed and riding the subway, two things I needn’t do to work in my apartment. At home, I have the perfect chair and ottoman arrangement, and a bathroom and kitchen at close hand. Also like Maura, I had my favorite snacks which I could eat whenever I wanted as loudly or slovenly as I desired.

In general, I worked every weekday and some weekends. I did not work every hour of every workday, but neither do actual writers (I am inspired by the late David Foster Wallace in many ways). I am not a word count person nor an hours at the desk person. I feel productive when I have an insight that pushes me forward or if I successfully deal with a messy clump of disorganization. I am an 11th hour writer. Most of the work happens when I’m in the proverbial shower or on the walk in the park, where I manically jot into my phone some misspelled then hilariously autocorrected jumble of letters to remember my brilliant solution when I get back to my chair. Writing comes in spurts, and it is rare to see me typing for more than a couple of minutes at a stretch. It’s a matter of keeping notes and then the writing is patching those together into a cohesive narrative. Somehow, the article or essay or book gets written. As painful as the process can be, I have evidence that this seemingly inefficient process works for me, and I am still trying to embrace it. I have no choice.

So you might think at me, why do you need a sabbatical to get this done? Can’t you write a book in your jagged manner while holding down a day job and doing your patch thing for, say, an hour a day that you’ve carved out for yourself with your office door closed? No. You know what it’s like at work. And besides, after several decades of writing, I have finally accepted the inconvenient fact that I need a good uninterrupted seven hours of pacing, procrastinating, grazing, napping, and podcast listening to squeeze out a quality two hours of work. But those other five hours are essential to the package.

Now for some advice to potential future sabbatical takers. Most importantly, take one. You are entitled to it. Don’t wait until you have a fully formed project. It is a time for exploration, freeing your mind in ways that are unthinkable when hemmed in by the parentheses of an academic calendar and a Monday to Friday workweek.

I took a different approach from Maura and wholly renounced service obligations and did not look at my institutional email. For those faculty whose projects are enmeshed with their work (perhaps a frequent scenario for library faculty), it might be useful or unavoidable to stay connected to your job, but if not, I urge you to ghost your workplace. It’s distracting, interferes with any fantasy you might be trying to live out, and offers a way too tempting source of procrastination from the true task. Speaking of procrastination, delete all social media accounts or have a partner or friend create a new password so that only s/he can grant you access.

Don’t fuss about day to day accomplishments. Avail yourself of the slower, uninterrupted, un-earmarked pace to enjoy life and organically learn about your best habits. You might find out how useful naps are and that you work better at certain times of day. (After about half the year was over, I discovered that I could focus best between the hours of 8-11pm and that’s when I got my best work done. I then allowed myself to take long walks or do errands during the day without feeling guilty.)

You might not like this one: Start work on your project right away, even if it’s only one hour a day, instead of pretending that first you must undertake a deep clean of every room in your house or prepare your taxes or visit every remote family member you never see. You can actually do a little of both. Start forging the association between your sabbatical time and your project so it becomes an agreeable journey and not a looming chore.

I loved being a writer. I know I am still one, even though I am also back to being a librarian, employee, person-who-gets-dressed-and-goes-somewhere-else-to-earn-a-paycheck, but I still envy myself and that precious year. I wish every person in every job had the luxury of a sabbatical. I am unspeakably grateful for it, and I look forward to three years and two months and seven days from now when I am due for another one. When I get there I will likely do everything exactly the same way.

As I wrote this post my sabbatical was winding down and the summer season in NYC was in full swing. August is always somewhat strange for me since our K-12 schools don’t go back until after Labor Day. My kid is still very much in his summer vacation, though I think for most folks in academia there’s more summer behind us than in front of us right now.

The usual end of summer thoughts and feels are more intense this year with my sabbatical coming to an end as well. Have I made enough progress on my research during my time off that I’ll be able to bring those projects to completion once I’m back at work and have less time available for research? Did I make headway on my other, non-academic goals? Am I heading into the return to work (and, soon enough, the beginning of the busy fall semester) well-rested and ready to go? Within a month after I’m back on campus I’ll need to submit a brief summary of what I accomplished during the time I spent on sabbatical, so while some of these thoughts are my own internal accounting measures there’s an external need to report, too.

For most of these questions I’m happy to report that the answer is yes. That’s not to say that I’m not at all nervous about getting back into my work routine and activities — six months is a long time to be away, and my first day of school feeling will doubtless be turned way up when I walk into the library on that first day back. But I’m generally feeling satisfied with the amount and kinds of research (and other stuff) that I’ve been able to accomplish. I’m also newly appreciative of some of the aspects of my regular day job that had perhaps become invisible to me before taking a sabbatical.

Of course there are things I will miss about being on leave. In no particular order:

Food! It’s been great to be able to eat when and what I want for lunch and snacks. I usually bring leftovers to work for lunch, which are usually delicious (my spouse is a terrific cook). But some of my preferred lunch and snack foods just aren’t feasible for the in-library workday. My absolute favorite snack (in the appropriate seasons) is an apple cut into slices spread with chunky peanut butter. So delicious, and much too messy for eating at work. During sabbatical I’ve found that my go-to fast lunch is scrambled eggs with kimchi and toast. I could eat kimchi every day, and scrambled eggs are easy and help me eat less meat (my spouse and I are trying to eat more vegetarian though it’s slow going as our teen is a committed carnivore).

Flexibility. While I’ve spent most of the days during most of the weeks of my leave working on my research, it’s been lovely to take some weekdays off, too. As a person who identifies as about 60% introvert I appreciate the opportunities to take public transportation, go shopping, and visit museums or other locations in the giant city where I live at times during the week when they’re less crowded. And it’s nice to be able to take any date and time for doctor’s visits or other appointments that need to be scheduled, too. Having a flexible schedule also made it easier to devote weekends more completely to family outings or other commitments, since I could get some of the usual errands and chores done during the week.

Late afternoon walks with my spouse. The late afternoons are hard for me, energy-wise, as I know is quite common. As I mentioned in a previous post, my spouse (who works from home) and I fell into a routine during my sabbatical of taking a walk for an hour or so in the park or botanic gardens near our apartment. Before school let out this was also a nice way for us to clear out of the apartment as our teenager was getting home from school, giving him a little bit of space to get a snack and decompress. I might try and take a brisk short walk in the afternoons when I’m back in the library, just to get my energy back up, but I’ll miss the long walks.

There are also things that I will not miss about being on sabbatical:

The cognitive load of schedule variability. The flipside of sabbatical’s time flexibility is the lack of a consistent schedule day to day, and as I’ve written previously I found myself struggling with this much more than I anticipated. Maintaining and updating a very detailed list of everything I wanted to accomplish during my leave helped, for sure, as did setting aside some time on Sunday evenings to sketch out a plan for the coming week. In a way that’s not too different from how I manage my time in the library: I have a detailed to-do list that I revisit last thing on Friday to set me up for the following week. But the lack of scheduled commitments was sometimes a challenge, as was the variation in the work I was doing over the 6 months of my leave (e.g. from data collection to analyzing to mostly writing). I’m looking forward to getting back to a more predictable schedule once I’m back from leave, one that has some structure while also leaving some space for flexibility.

The need to leave the house every (week)day. I like our apartment: it’s a pleasant place to be, has easy access to food, drink, and two snuggly cats. It’s all too easy to convince myself not to leave the house — maybe it’s hot or raining, maybe the local library will be crowded, maybe it’s not worth the 90 minute round-trip commute to my spot in the study room at the NYPL. Even on days that I get lots done at home, I think overall I’m more productive when I’ve left the house for at least a little while every day.

Trying to find a comfortable place to type. I wrote a whole post about this a couple of months ago, and while I’ve mostly figured it out at this point in/almost at the end of my sabbatical, the fact is that it’s still more physically comfortable for me to do sustained computer work in my office rather than at home or at another location with my laptop.

Okay, full disclosure: I will miss the cats when I go back to work. But that just means they’ll be even more snuggly on the weekends, right?

I am certain that EVERYONE asks this question at the end of sabbatical. Six months ago I felt like time was endless and I couldn’t see my way past the first few days. I fell into a routine and sought to balance work with play. I cherished time with my family and tried to preserve quiet moments for myself. But as I embarked on my final few weeks, I did everything in my power to ignore all things work. I think I was fairly successful, especially since my email is looming as I write this.

Today is my third day back at work. I feel relaxed and softer. I am centered and focused. And I cannot get my mind off this pair of tweets from my colleague Joan Petit*:

Does forgetting your computer login count? JK! I thought this was so insightful and am wondering how I will feel after I’ve been back in the library for a couple of weeks.

Right now my first priority is trying to catch up on email. I am sure that everyone has their own preferred plan for handling the deluge of email that continues to pile up while on sabbatical. Since I was serving as incoming chair of the ACRL Instruction Section, I tried to keep up with messages that needed my immediate attention but I have to admit that the last two months I have ignored more than usual. I kept telling myself, “Surely that can wait a few more weeks?” Yesterday and today I’ve spent time categorizing email more than answering anything. If I owe you an email (or two!) I am hoping to be caught up by the end of next week. I wonder if a future guest writer for this blog will have advice I could’ve used today!

The other goal I had this week was to catch up with colleagues. This was an interesting aspect of sabbatical that I was warned about early on – deciding how much you want to engage with colleagues while formally away from work. Some choose to schedule brief meetings or informal lunches to try and keep caught up on major events. I suppose this is because we all realize that the day-to-day activities of our libraries can change quite a bit over the course of several months. Another colleague told me that for her to fully immerse into her sabbatical, she choose to forgo those get-togethers and stay off-campus entirely. I choose this route and I was glad I did. It’s too easy for me to let the little things consume too much time in my head. Coming back to my office after months and months made it feel new and familiar at the same time. (I’m daydreaming about some decorating changes to emphasize this for myself.) Running into colleagues in the hallway has been fun, too. I had lunch with one of my favorite colleagues today and it was good to catch up on our personal lives and work. As an aside, I can see this look on a few colleagues faces that makes me wonder if they are thinking, “I will give her a few more days but I need to remember to ask her about X very soon.”

What I wasn’t prepared for were the number of colleagues that would leave for new positions while I was gone. While I was alerted to their decisions via email, I didn’t get to say goodbye in person and there is some emotional pain in that reality. One colleague had been a mentor to me since I was in library school, over a decade of my professional life. There are pockets of emptiness in my heart for those folks.

But there are also many new faces! I taught a welcome session for new librarians, visiting residents, and new graduate students form the iSchool yesterday and that was heartwarming. Lots of welcoming smiles in the audience and I remembered again how much I enjoy sharing myself with new colleagues. And teaching!

My to-do list is growing … and one of my top priorities is to work with Maura to invite guest writers to examine other aspects of their sabbaticals. There are many topics to explore and out hope is that this blog will serve as a planning and reflection device for those who are dreaming of and planning and recovering from librarian sabbaticals. You will soon see us reaching out over a few listservs and we hope if you are reading this that you will consider reaching out. I know there are many sabbatical librarians out there but we couldn’t find much in the way of discussion when we started this journey last winter.

Posts navigation

Why a sabbatical blog?

As members of the faculty, librarians may have access to a sabbatical and as we planned ours, we couldn’t find much discussion or advice in our community. This blog aims to change that - we will talk about all aspects of taking a sabbatical: professional and personal, preparing for and mapping a research project, managing time, reflecting on how we got to this point in our career including the tenure process, sharing the experience, planning for life after sabbatical, and so much more. We invite you to join the conversation by leaving a comment or volunteering to be a guest author.
Submit a proposal